Wings Over Scotland

Labour’s Douglas Alexander got himself in a right old pickle this weekend, at first claiming that the party’s new campaign around a poster about VAT referred to an annual bill of £450 for the average family, but then trying to backtrack in a panic and claim the sum was calculated over the entire period of the coalition government when it was pointed out to him that the figure was ludicrous.

Wings Over Scotland is of course dedicated above all to keeping the record straight, so our sinister network of shadowy cyber-agents got straight onto the case.

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This morning’s Daily Mail reports that Alistair Darling has been “sidelined” by the No campaign, with Douglas Alexander drafted into his place. We’ve remarked previously on this site about our bemusement over the reverence with which Mr Alexander’s intellect is regarded by the Scottish media, and we’re none the wiser after this:

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There doesn’t seem to have been a huge amount of coverage of Ed Miliband’s visit to Scotland today, presumably because there’s so little to report. The Labour leader came to Dundee and promised to commit to implementing the party’s feeble and essentially meaningless “Devo Nano” proposals – something that both he and Johann Lamont had already done in interviews at the time of the Scottish Labour conference in March – and also reiterated a few UK-wide policies.

So the BBC, perhaps aware of the low levels of newsworthiness in the visit and plainly keen to avoid having to report any more significant developments in the independence debate, decided to sex things up a bit for him.

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David Cameron tells the nation on this morning’s BBC News that the Conservatives are the party for those who want Britain out of the EU.

Curiously, in England this statement is meant as a vote-winner. Each to their own.

We can do this in one picture, folks. Remember barely a fortnight ago, when the Tories were wailing about how there wasn’t enough immigration into Scotland to sustain its economy in the coming decades? Here’s a little snippet of data from a Survation poll for the Daily Mirror earlier this week.

Well, there’s a dilemma, eh? Scotland need more immigrants, but the rest of the UK is absolutely desperate to have fewer – so much so that it’s 67% more important than the cost of living, twice as important as the state of the economy, over three times as important as unemployment or debt, and FIVE times as important as the NHS.

Immigration policy is reserved to Westminster. Which way do you see that going?

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Owen Jones in the Guardian, 8 May 2014:

“Despite being occasionally portrayed as the second coming of Vladimir Lenin, Labour’s key policies are a mixture of backing Tory spending plans for a year, real-term cuts to public sector pay, restoring the 50p tax (apparently temporarily), a short-term energy bill freeze and more secure private-sector tenancy agreements.”

A real revolution to rally behind there, eh viewers?

The Times sells a paltry 18,155 copies a day in Scotland, and its website is locked behind the most expensive paywall of any publication that we know of, so not many people will read its Scottish stories in their original location.

Of course, we’re sure anything important would be prominently featured across the rest of the media just like yesterday’s big pensions news was, so there would be no need to reproduce the whole thing here.

Still, better safe than sorry, eh?

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Update: the big pensions story of the day has now made it as far as the BBC. The Herald has also made its online version a bit more visible. No other media outlet, as far as we’ve spotted, has picked it up. It’ll be fascinating to see whether it gets covered on Reporting Scotland and Scotland Tonight in the next hour. [EDIT: No.]

Meanwhile, we thought you might like some more footage from the hearing.

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Just in case Alistair Darling missed it:

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A phenomenon we’ve reported on numerous times on this site is the strange way that the media will regard the same opinion-poll statistics in radically different ways depending on how the figures relate to their political agenda.

So if 65% of Scots say they think Alex Salmond is a swell and trustworthy guy, the headline will be “MORE THAN A THIRD OF SCOTS DON’T TRUST SLIPPERY SALMOND”. Conversely, if those numbers are reversed on a referendum poll, the banner lead will be “ONLY A THIRD OF SCOTS BACK SEPARATION”.

But there are other ways of misrepresenting numbers, too.

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Despite the strikingly unequivocal nature of David Trimble’s clarification yesterday of his comments about the independence referendum’s potential impact on Northern Irish politics, remarkably the media are today still trying to spin them into a dire warning about a Yes vote causing renewed violence in the province.

The picture below is a page from this morning’s Sunday Times.

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BBC Northern Ireland website, 2 May 2014:

“Former NI First Minister Lord Trimble has said the biggest threat to peace in Northern Ireland would be if Scotland were to vote for independence.”

Lord Trimble on “Good Morning Scotland”, 3 May 2014 (31m 30s):

“I want to correct what you said… [the website] reported me as saying that would threaten the peace process. I did not say that, that is not my view.

Actually, a Yes vote in Scotland would reinforce the argument against violence, because it’s a demonstration of how you can achieve major change through the political democratic process.”

Whoops, eh? Oddly, while the original story is still on the BBC NI website, we can’t seem to find one reporting the correction anywhere, even though Lord Trimble spoke to GMS more than eight hours ago. We’re sure it’ll be along any minute now.

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